Separate User Folder Partition

[#1]

Hi all,

We want to put all our Macs onto AD which is why we have purchased Casper to manage them. It would be nice if we could have a separate Users partition so we could re-image these machines without our users losing their files, preferences, etc.

First of all is a separate partition for the Users folder a good way to go about this?

Secondly if it is would this guide be a good starting point http://lnx2mac.blogspot.com/2010/09/moving-os-x-users-to-separate-partition.html or would it be better to set up a symbolic link to the Users folder on the other partition?

Many thanks for any replies,
Chris

[ernstcs]

This is an interesting question given the whole recovery partition that's been discussed for Lion.

Craig E

[dderusha]

We use a secondary User partition. When we need to rebuild a users computer it works out really well.

You erase the OS partiton using Netboot/netinstall and launching casper imaging.

When the mac is done, it reboots to the main partition and we perform the following steps.

-Add a user with system preferences. after the user is created, go back and right click on the user name which gives you advanced permissions. change the home directory of said user to your secondary partition which contains your users data.

-get information on the home directory of said user. Make sure the user has permissions to read and write. propagate those permissions down.

Sometimes we need to propagate the permissions a second time.

The users desktop, dock, everything is back the way it was before you reformatted.

Dan De Rusha

[nessts]

if you are going to edit a live system you should use vifs instead
we have been mounting for 3 years, 4 years ago we tried a link, it was much worse.
if you create the fstab file at imaging time and format the disk with the extra partition(s) and name it properly, we use disk label instead of UUID, since I don't know UUIDs for every disk we will ever touch it will just mount during the first boot, you may need to create /Users/Shared and set permissions on it but other than that its a very stable solution.

#
# Warning - this file should only be modified with vifs(8)
#
# Failure to do so is unsupported and may be destructive.
#
LABEL=UserData /Users hfs rw 1 0

all of that being said, I have no idea how filevault will affect this on Lion, have not gotten that far yet.

--
Todd Ness
Technology Consultant/Non-Windows Services
Americas Regional Delivery Engineering
HP Enterprise Services

[sean]

If you run Active Directory, then you can specify the home location, which could be local or network; essentially any path/volume you choose. You wont need to symlink.

We run AD with network home accounts, but the path passed to the mac appears as a local unix path, it just happens to be a nfs automount from a linux server. Re-imaging the machine is therefore easy and the users can log into any machine with the same home folder.

Just specify in AD, under the users 'Unix Account' tab, the 'Home Directory'. This could be:

/Volumes/myuserpartition/Users/[username]

for example.

Sean